Heterotopias and other domestic landscapes

Heterotopias and Other Domestic Landscapes is artist Mariele Neudecker’s installation at the Regency Town House. The idea is to create a ‘geophysical slice’ of a recorded, yet fictionalized landscape through the air, earth and deep sea as visitors ascend and descend through the floors of the Regency Town House.

The installation by Neudecker, uses the entire building as a ‘container’ for a body of connecting works combining sculpture, video and photography using material shot on locations including the Arctic, Azores, Australia and the some of world’s deepest oceans. The interior of Regency Town House presents an otherworldly vessel for Neudecker’s commission; beginning in Greenland’s stratosphere at the top of the building and descending to the dark depths of the South West Indian Ocean in its basement rooms.

The installation begins in the first floor Drawing Room, the uppermost strata of Heterotopias installation featuring Recent Futures, a series of diptych photographs that take the intense Arctic sun as their subject, each with hand drawn vapor like rails added to the surface of the prints by Neudecker.

A hand-crafted maquette of the entire Heterotopias installation at the Regency Town House provides an installation within the installation, a geographical slice. This has been made in collaboration with *somewhere, artists Patricia Graham and Marzia Totonelli.

Continuing a level below, on the ground floor in the dining room is a centrally placed sculpture of an iceberg, made by Neudecker after having circumnavigated an iceberg in the Arctic. This is shown in relation to films, polaroids and pinhole photograph images of the same subject where the Horizon line features across one work to another.

Meanwhile light boxes depict the sun dipping above and below the Horizon in two opposite locations on the globe - South East Australia and West Azores.

In The Regency Town House Basement, Heterotopias plunges 2000 fathoms deep into the South West Indian Ocean in the form of various video works by Neudecker. The works reveal the world’s most isolated marine environments - a seemingly deserted seabed, a colossal underwater mountain range and the vast abyss of deep sea space.

Several of the works for Neudecker’s HOUSE 2013 commission have been informed by her research and development trip in 2012 to the extreme northern landscape of North West Greenland. In a six day sled expedition undertaken with Inuit subsistence hunters she documented the experience using eight cameras spanning the history of photography, from the latest digital HD technology via analog photography and Polaroid to a ‘pinhole biscuit tin’ camera.

Mariele Neudecker’s work manipulates perception, distortion, contrast, scale, reality and fiction in representations of vast spaces, limited by the human eye ‘frame’ of the view, or by remotely operated robotic cameras accessing dark environments under the sea where visibility is confined to narrow cones of torchlight. Human traces often appear in her landscapes, in surprising collisions with the natural world, in an attempt to capture continuous change and temporality as
much as permanence and stability.

A co-commission by Brighton Festival and HOUSE 2013

Supported by Arts Council England

Neudecker’s new Arctic and deep sea works have been developed in collaboration with Invisible Dust.